After months’ of constant fall and to being the lowest in years since the recession in May 2008, the unemployment rate rose by 0.2 percentage points to clock 4.9 percent during June 2016. The economy added 287K jobs led by Leisure and Hospitality followed and Healthcare. At the end of this month, the number of unemployed persons in the country was 7.8 million.

Unemployment Rate Among Major Workers Groups

Adult Men – 4.5%

Adult Women – 4.5%

Teenagers – 16.0%

While the jobless rates for adult men and women edged up by 0.3 percentage points, the category of teenagers remained stable. It must be noted that over the last couple of months, employment among teenagers has seen little improvement.

Unemployment Rate Among Ethnic Groups

Blacks – 8.6%

Asians – 3.5%

Whites – 4.4%

Hispanics – 5.8%

Except Asians, all other ethnic groups witnessed a fall in employment. The former dropped a considerable 0.6 percentage points from last month to clock the best performance among all groups. Blacks continue to lead the table with the highest unemployment in this category.

General Highlights

The numbers of persons falling in the category of “unemployed less than 5 weeks” went up by 211,000 during this month compared to June 2016.

On the flipside, persons categorized as long-term unemployed was stable at 2.0 million. This category consists of people who remained jobless for 27 weeks or more. This category alone accounts for 25.8% of the total unemployed population.

The number of persons falling under the category of part-time for economic reasons fell by 587,000 to clock 5.8 million in this month. Such persons worked part-time due to involuntary reasons.

The category of marginally attached to the labor force consisted of 1.8 million persons. Here, jobless workers had not looked for a job 4 weeks before the survey.

Employment Data in Various Industries (Top Highlights)

The leisure and hospitality sector added 59,000 during June, making it the highest grosser in terms of job creations.

Food services & drinking places: +22,000 jobs

Performing arts and spectator sports: +14,000 jobs

2) Healthcare and social assistance were the second highest job creators during this month with 58,000 jobs.

Ambulatory health services: +19,000 jobs

Hospitals: +15,000

3) Mining continued to tumble by losing 6,000 jobs during this month. Since September 2014, this sector has lost a whopping 211,000 jobs.

Other Highlights

The average workweek for all employees remained the same as previous month – 34.4 hours.

The manufacturing workweek went down by 0.1 hours to clock 40.7 hours and the average overtime was 3.3 hours during this month.

The average hourly earnings for all employees was $25.61, up by 6 cents from last month.

The average hourly earnings of production and nonsupervisory employees in the private sector was $21.51, up by 2 cents.